This post is going to cover the updates that have been going on over at our Sol Contingency forums and I'll do a better job to keep you guys in the loop as things happen.

First, there are some preliminary screenshots of a map that I'm working on called Ice Breaker. The back story I have for this map is this:

Planet Phendrana was devastated when a meteor hit the surface, diverting it off of its normal orbit. Now that it is further away from its Sun, the whole planet has frozen over. There are massive blizzards that cover the planet as a result of the the change in orbit. All human installations were abandoned prior to the catastrophic event, but some of the machinery survived the climate change. Still performing maintenance, the robots of ISB-0215 have cleared upper levels of the facility, but were frozen in place when an insulated water reservoir was breached when the ceiling of the main atrium gave out. I chose the name Ice Breaker because of 1, the ice (duh lol) and 2, because I designed this map to be a balance of vertical and horizontal action to "break the ice" for non-6DoF players.

Next, as mentioned in another post, we announced our main ship for our Proving Grounds release: the Eclipse.

There has also been a released screenshot of our missiles of choice for Proving Grounds: The Dumbfire Missile and the Seeker Missile (names are WIP of course). There was also a screenshot of a bot that DuderSeb came up with (tentatively the "Stealth Hulk)

1/2 Hawk is an absolute badass when it come to UDK and UE4 and he designed this for use in his recreation of Neptune in Sol Contingency. It's like the classic screens in D1 and D2 with rotating bots, but in 3D! Fear not, the classic rotating bot screens are still around

Keep your eyes peeled for more info! Feel free to hit us up at our forums or just PM me. We want to keep the Descent community involved with this game because we first and foremost want to make a game that we can be playing with you guys as a community. As fans. 1/2Hawk said it best when someone from the DU forums came over with some questions about microtransactions and other things.

1/2Hawk wrote:...right or wrong we're not in it for the money - would rather be playing with y'all.

The concern for community involvement has also reached within our Dev forums:

DuderSeb wrote:I really want us to get more intimate with the community. I'm worried about this a lot.
Not only do I want to be a project that gets the community involved, but also I would love to be able to take all levels of feedback into account in order to try and make something that appeals to all just like Descent did.

Verran wrote:Same here. There's several reasons I, personally, haven't brought up and pressed this as an issue:

A tangible, working game is far more valuable than any talk: true feedback will come post-release
PG is a demo, so almost everything can be considered temporary (UE4 after PG?)
Sol C has limited development time & resources

For now, that's all, but we will be releasing some videos soon. I'll leave you with Verran's video of flying around our first announced map, Vertigo, using a Sidewinder Pro and trichording everywhere.

Yeah I would like us to get community feedback more but I went by the same logic that to get feedback you should have something to get feedback on. The best games are the ones where the devs listen to their fans and don't discard their input, that's true, but they're also the ones where the devs think critically about the advice itself and where it's coming from.

Oh yeah of course, but we've given out a bunch of concepts and videos that are proof of concepts for now. For example, Verran's video shows flawless flight mechanics that closely mimic the mechanics we're looking to get. From that people can critique what we have so far. Of course the feedback is going to be a lot more meaningful when we launch PG, but until then, we want the community to know that we're listening to what they're saying and will still be listening once we launch PG. For now, a lot of things can easily change so now is a good time that people can comment what they think of what we have and we can take those critiques to heart before we get too far into development and it becomes way harder to change things.

Lol again, of course. The main purpose of the post, however was to keep awareness raised and let them know we're not out of the picture and we're still hard at work. I mean look at this awesome teaser Max put on our FB page!

The color gave it away, but if they had been painted blue they would have made a solid contender for homing missiles too IMO. I like it, but if I had to say something critical about the design: the engines in the back look kinda small for a missile that is supposed to be really fast... I think you could actually get away with all 3 engine nozzles basically taking up the entire back of the missile, it would do a better job of visually selling the idea that its really fast if the engines stand out compared to normal missiles.

Re: I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE
Postby Yoshimitsu » 15 Aug 2015, 05:50
After all I just finished putting together a Sidewinder 3D Pro USB converter together hours ago in anticipation of all the 6dof goodness coming soon

Although I have long been accustomed to play on the mouse, today I bought a 55-inch TV set and connected to a computer specifically for the new game.

Duper wrote:
Hrm. Looking at their trailer, I see a whole lotta meh. I'm sure there are plenty that will go for it, but the mechanics are too clunky and arcade style. Gfx are shiny, but looks very much like Tron. There are two other "Descent games" that are made by folks within the community. One is from here in my town.

Geocore and Talon ...not to mention Retrovirus

imo, this isn't Descent, it's a cheap knock off.
Still thx for the heads up. I quite watching ARS a long time ago.

Same here really, from what I could see of it, looks a lot like D3 tech almost!

I just want to hope that in the SOLC will have a good control of the ships. Since the game does not exist if there is no good control of the ship. I would be happy with ship control as well as in Pyromania.

It would be good, if so. Because I stopped playing Retrovirus for this reason. And also I am extremely disappointed with the excessive pixelation fragments of shots, smoke, and other details in Sublevel Zero. I use a large TV as a monitor, so it's especially annoying, it is practically impossible to play comfortably, dammit.